Investigating Robustness in Vision-Language Models via Adversarial Prompt Illumination

Abstract

Trained on large corpora of image-text pairs, vision-language models (VLMs) have proven broadly useful across many applications. However, they can still make errors that humans rarely do, particularly when exposed to adversarial inputs crafted to mislead them. Traditional approaches to uncovering such vulnerabilities typically optimize a single input, such as a text prompt, to induce incorrect predictions while remaining plausible to human readers. These methods tend to identify only one or a few high-impact adversarial examples, offering a narrow view of model weaknesses. In contrast, we argue that a Quality-Diversity (QD) perspective is more informative. Rather than searching for a single best attack, QD explicitly aims to generate many high-quality adversarial prompts spanning diverse behaviors and characteristics. This allows us not only to diagnose model weaknesses, but also to characterize which prompts are robust and which are especially fragile. Our experiments show that CVT-MAP-Elites, a QD method integrated into our pipeline, discovers a richer and more diverse set of meaningful adversarial samples than quality-only optimization. Consequently, our approach achieves broader search-space coverage and provides deeper insight into VLM failure modes on text-to-image retrieval tasks in both general and medical domains.